People will eventually be exposed to robotic agents that may protest their commands for a wide range of reasons. We present an experiment designed to determine whether a robot's appearance has a significant effect on the amount of agency people ascribed to it and its ability to dissuade a human operator from forcing it to carry out a specific command. Participants engage in a human-robot interaction (HRI) with either a small humanoid or non-humanoid robot that verbally protests a command. Initial results indicate that humanoid appearance does not significantly affect the behavior of human operators in the task. Agency ratings given to the robots were also not significantly affected.
@inproceedings{briggsetal14roman,
title={Actions Speak Louder Than Looks: Does Robot Appearance Affect Human Reactions to Robot Protest and Distress?},
author={Gordon Briggs and Bryce Gessell and Matthew Dunlap and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2014},
booktitle={Proceedings of 23rd IEEE Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man)},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/briggsetal14roman.pdf}
doi={10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926402}
}